Michel Temer

Michel Miguel Elias Temer Lulia was born on September 23, 1940, in Tietê, a small town in the interior of São Paulo state. He was the youngest of eight children of Nakhoul and March Temer, Maronite Christian immigrants who had left the village of Btaaboura in northern Lebanon in 1925 and settled in Brazil, where the family worked in rice farming and coffee trading ^[1]. Growing up in a Lebanese Brazilian household in rural São Paulo shaped Temer's identity, and he maintained ties to his family's homeland throughout his career, visiting Lebanon as a senior official decades later ^[2].

Temer moved to the state capital for his education and studied law at the Faculty of Law of the University of São Paulo, one of the most prestigious legal schools in Latin America, graduating in 1963 ^[1]. He continued into graduate work at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, where he earned a doctorate in public law in 1974. The academic side of his life never disappeared: he became a professor of constitutional law at the same university, and his textbook on Brazilian constitutional law, Elementos de Direito Constitucional, went through dozens of editions and became standard reading for generations of Brazilian law students ^[3].

Temer's early professional life unfolded inside the São Paulo state bureaucracy rather than in elected office. He worked in the state education secretariat in the 1960s and later served as state attorney general (procurador geral) of São Paulo. In 1984, Governor Franco Montoro appointed him secretary of public security for São Paulo state, a demanding post he held during the tense final phase of Brazil's military dictatorship and again in the early 1990s ^[1].

His electoral career began with Brazil's return to democracy. In 1986 he won a seat in the National Constituent Assembly, the body that drafted the democratic constitution promulgated in 1988, an experience that matched his academic specialty in constitutional law ^[3]. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement, known as the PMDB and later renamed the MDB, and would be returned to the Chamber repeatedly over the following two decades.

Within Congress, Temer became known less as an orator than as a negotiator and party manager. He was elected Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies three times, presiding over the lower house from 1997 to 2001 and again from 2009 to 2010 ^[2]. In 2001 he became national president of the PMDB, the sprawling centrist party that anchored nearly every Brazilian governing coalition, and he led it for more than fifteen years. That position made him one of the most influential brokers in Brasília, a politician whose support could make or unmake presidential majorities ^[4].

In 2010 the Workers' Party candidate Dilma Rousseff chose Temer as her running mate, cementing the alliance between her party and the PMDB. The ticket won the October 2010 election, and Temer took office as the 24th Vice-President of Brazil on January 1, 2011 ^[1]. The pairing was repeated in 2014, when Rousseff and Temer narrowly won a second term against Aécio Neves in one of the closest presidential races since redemocratization ^[2].

The second term quickly unraveled. Brazil slid into a deep recession, the sprawling Operation Car Wash corruption investigation implicated large parts of the political class, and Rousseff's congressional support collapsed. In December 2015 a leaked letter from Temer to Rousseff, in which he complained of being treated as a decorative vice-president, signaled the breakdown of the alliance ^[4]. In March 2016 the PMDB formally left the governing coalition, a decisive step toward the impeachment process then advancing in Congress.

When the Senate voted in May 2016 to put Rousseff on trial over allegations that she had manipulated federal budget accounts, Temer became acting president. On August 31, 2016, the Senate voted 61 to 20 to remove Rousseff from office, and Temer was sworn in as president for the remainder of the term, through the end of 2018 ^[5]. Rousseff and her supporters denounced the process as a parliamentary coup, a characterization Temer always rejected, pointing to the constitutional procedures followed by both houses of Congress ^[4].

Temer took over a country in economic crisis, and his government made fiscal retrenchment its central project. In December 2016 Congress approved a constitutional amendment, known as the spending ceiling or Teto de Gastos, that froze federal spending growth in real terms for up to twenty years, one of the most stringent fiscal rules adopted by any large economy ^[5]. In 2017 his government passed a sweeping labor reform that loosened Brazil's decades-old labor code, allowing negotiated agreements to override statutory rules in many areas and reducing labor litigation ^[6]. Supporters credited these measures with restoring investor confidence as Brazil emerged from recession; critics argued they weakened social protections.

His presidency was also consumed by scandal. In May 2017 the newspaper O Globo revealed a secretly recorded conversation between Temer and Joesley Batista, an executive of the meatpacking giant JBS, which prosecutors said showed the president condoning hush payments to a jailed former Speaker of the Chamber, Eduardo Cunha ^[6]. Temer denied wrongdoing and refused to resign. The prosecutor general charged him with corruption in 2017, but under Brazilian law a sitting president can only stand trial with the consent of the Chamber of Deputies, and the Chamber twice voted to block the charges, in August and October 2017 ^[5].

Temer governed with historically weak popular support. Polls by Datafolha and other institutes during 2017 and 2018 recorded approval ratings in the single digits, among the lowest ever measured for a Brazilian president ^[4]. Other notable episodes of his term included a federal intervention in public security in the state of Rio de Janeiro in 2018, the first such intervention under the 1988 constitution, and a nationwide truckers' strike in May 2018 that paralyzed the economy for days ^[2]. He did not seek election in 2018 and handed the presidency to Jair Bolsonaro on January 1, 2019.

Temer has been married three times and has five children. His third wife, Marcela Tedeschi Temer, whom he married in 2003, served as first lady during his presidency; the couple's son Michel, known as Michelzinho, was born in 2009 ^[1].

Beyond law and politics, Temer writes poetry. He published a collection of short verse titled Anônima Intimidade in 2013, and interviewers often noted the contrast between his austere political persona and his literary sideline ^[2]. He also wrote a memoir of the impeachment period and his presidency, published after he left office. His scholarly output remains his most durable written work: Elementos de Direito Constitucional continues to be reprinted and cited in Brazilian courts and classrooms ^[3].

His Lebanese heritage remained a public part of his identity. As the first person of Lebanese descent to serve as president of Brazil, home to one of the world's largest Lebanese diaspora communities, Temer was received with particular attention in Beirut, and he represented Brazil at international gatherings concerning Lebanon after the 2020 Beirut port explosion, leading the Brazilian delegation that delivered humanitarian aid ^[2].

Legal troubles followed Temer out of office. In March 2019 he was arrested in São Paulo as part of an offshoot of the Car Wash investigation involving alleged graft in contracts connected to the Angra 3 nuclear plant. He spent four days in custody before a court ordered his release, was briefly detained again in May of that year, and consistently denied all accusations ^[6]. In the years that followed, courts dismissed or archived several of the cases against him, and he was not convicted of any crime ^[4].

Rather than retreating from public life, Temer settled into the role of elder statesman and constitutional consultant. In 2021 President Jair Bolsonaro, after issuing statements attacking the Supreme Court during Independence Day demonstrations, turned to Temer to help draft a conciliatory letter that defused the institutional crisis, an episode that highlighted Temer's reputation as a fixer trusted across party lines ^[2]. He continued to teach, lecture, and comment on constitutional questions, and remained an influential voice within the MDB without seeking elected office again.

Any assessment of the Michel Temer biography turns on a paradox: a president who never won the office at the ballot box, and who left it with minimal popular support, nonetheless enacted structural reforms that outlasted him. The spending cap and the 2017 labor law reshaped Brazil's fiscal and employment landscape for years, and later governments built on his pension reform proposal, which Congress passed in modified form in 2019 under his successor ^[5].

For those asking who was Michel Temer in Brazil's democratic story, historians point to his role in three distinct chapters: the drafting of the 1988 constitution, the management of congressional coalitions across two decades, and the turbulent transition of 2016. Admirers list among Michel Temer achievements the stabilization of the economy after the worst recession in Brazil's modern record and the preservation of institutional continuity in a moment of rupture ^[6]. Critics counter that his rise showed how impeachment could be used to reverse an election, and that his government answered to Congress and markets rather than to voters ^[4].

The plain Michel Temer facts support both readings. He remains a singular figure: a constitutional law professor who reached the presidency through the constitution's own removal mechanism, a poet in a political world of blunt bargaining, and the first Brazilian head of state of Lebanese descent. His career is likely to be studied less for charisma, which he never claimed, than for what it reveals about how power actually moves through Brazil's Congress, courts, and parties ^[3].